The opportunity for a new era in British television begins at LBC studios, a radio station that has tested and effectively extended British legal requirements for “broadcast” news to be “balanced”. Instead of offering intermediate recitations of news developments, the network offers conflicting and sometimes strident debates on issues. The season prospered during the long run for Brexit, making it clear to broadcasters that they could abandon their rigid customs and reflect more party passions – as long as the stations did not adopt just one political side.
Now, television is ready to fill the space that LBC has opened up. The most ambitious player in this new arena may be Andrew Neil, a Scotsman who transformed The Sunday Times to Murdoch in the 1980s before emerging as one of the BBC’s most formidable interviewers. He is a conservative, but his style shares almost nothing with his right-wing American counterparts, who alternate between asking complicated questions to Republican politicians and obliterating obscure liberals who have foolishly entered their sets. Mr. Neil is an equal opportunity interrogator and may be best known in the United States for a 2019 tribute from conservative figure Ben Shapiro. In the 2019 British election, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to submit to an interview with him.
I spoke with Mr. Neil at his home on the French Riviera, where he is facing the pandemic and preparing to start a new 24-hour cable channel network, GB News, this spring. When I called, he was watching “MSNBC Live with Craig Melvin”. “I think there are things to learn from him in terms of programming, and the visuals are very strong,” he said of the American left-wing channel. “In terms of formatting and style, I think MSNBC and Fox are the two models that we are following.”
Neil raised £ 60m (about $ 83m) to start the channel, including investments by American giant Discovery and hedge fund manager Paul Marshall. (Marshall’s unrelated son is taking a break from playing banjo in the band Mumford and Sons to “examine my blind spots” after praising a far-right book on Twitter.) Neil said he hoped that amount would last on the network for at least three years, although it is a pittance by American cable news standards.
He said he planned to hire about 100 journalists, a fraction of the BBC’s more than 2,000, but intended to capture the resentment of London-centered media by getting many of them to broadcast from their hometowns in the north. The channel will feature other news services for breaking news, he said, and will focus its resources on producing American-style news programs run by personalities. But he said he would not follow American law for bizarre conspiracy theories, and he denounced Donald Trump’s claim that he won the election in the United States.
“I don’t think there’s an appetite in Britain for ridiculous conflicts,” said Neil. Still, he plans to run a segment on his own primetime show called “woke watch”, in which he can scoff at what he sees as progressive excesses. He cited as an example a recent report in which British nurses were told they could use the word “breastfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding” to include transgender people.